At this year’s Hungarian Grand Prix, Alex Albon became the first driver to complete 100 races with Williams, a few rounds after eclipsing Nigel Mansell as the team’s most ‘capped’ driver. It’s an interesting stat, one that perhaps denotes F1’s current race inflation and former attitude to drivers. Yet this also illustrates how important Albon has become within Williams’s modern-day hierarchy.
In the days of Sir Frank Williams and Patrick Head, drivers were disposable; why pay more for a driver when that money could be spent on engineering? It explains why Sir Frank was reluctant to hand Mansell the lucrative contract he desired on winning the 1992 championship, or why Damon Hill was let go for 1997. Williams had an idea of what a driver was worth and wouldn’t budge if the demands exceeded that value.
